Funds are requested from NIH to cofund with the NSF a special topic Symposium on Critical and Emerging Issues in Biomedical Engineering to be held in association with the IEEE/EMBS 1986 Annual Conference. As presently planned, the Symposium consists of a series of 12 prognostic (i.e. forward-looking) tutorials and 12 related Mini-Symposia. For each tutorial, a recognized expert will emphasize past, present, and future engineering technologies involved in different areas of biomedical engineering. The Symposium will involve national and international academic, medical and industrial research leaders who will focus on scientific and technical advances, applications, limitations, and problems to be solved. The tutorials are interspersed across four days to provide attendees a good mix of general material and state-of-the-art presentations from the technical sessions. The tutorials will not overlap in time with any technical sessions, thus giving Conference attendees the opportunity to attend technical sessions in their own track, as well as this "diagonal" Symposium track encompassing the main theme of each technical track. The Symposium will thus serve an additional function to its hundreds of attendees as well as an informational, planning and assessment function of the field for the NSF and NIH. Three 30 minute tutorials will be sequentially given during each day's Symposium session, followed by 3 concurrent Mini-Symposia dealing with the topics raised in each tutorial. All papers from the Symposium will be published in a special Proceedings, made available at the time of registration. Post Symposium summaries of the sessions (including the discussion between panelists and with the audience), conclusions and recommendations will be prepared. In addition to support of the Symposium, we also ask NIH to underwrite the costs of 6 speakers to give in-depth reviews of various aspects of engineering and medicine in cardiology during the Technical Sessions.